At the same time, OneWeb announced that five companies had bid on the contract to build their satellites. Airbus has won the contract. They will build 900 150-kilogram satellites, 648 of which will be used in OneWeb's initial, near-polar orbit constellation, as shown in this animated video:

The Airbus announcement raises a lot of questions, that are addressed in a terrific in-depth interview of
Brian Holz, OneWeb’s Director of Space Systems. Holz talks about the reasons for producing the satellites in the US and the factors in choosing a factory location, the cost of the satellites ($4-500,000 each), the need to have global participation in a global project, launch services, satellite reliability and plans for eventually deorbiting them, financing and the business case, the search for manufacturers of millions of user terminals and antennas, etc.

Brian Holz, OneWeb’s Director of Space Systems

Holz and CEO Greg Wyler have experience -- they were together at O3b Networks, which is already delivering industrial-scale connectivity using medium-orbit satellites -- and are worthy competitors for Elon Musk's SpaceX effort. While seeking the same goal -- global connectivity -- OneWeb and SpaceX are using different technologies and have different organizational strategies.

SpaceX plans to have around 4,000 smaller, cheaper, shorter-lived satellites orbiting at only 645 kilometers. SpaceX will also keep more of the project in-house than OneWeb. OneWeb is becoming a coordinated coalition of partners. Virgin Galactic, Qualcomm, Honeywell Aerospace and Rockwell Collins are already on board and Airbus will not be a mere supplier, but a partner in a joint venture, which will include others for finance and marketing as well as technology.

Both projects are extremely ambitious, expensive and risky. I don't know which, if either, will "win," but the best possible outcome would be for both to succeed and compete with each other and with terrestrial ISPs.

I worry about the problems of capitalism with its massive concentration of power and income inequality, but this is an example of capitalism at its best.

Wednesday, June 03, 2015

We have been following the plans of Elon Musk and Greg Wyler to launch constellations of low-earth orbit satellites to provide global Internet service and fast long-distance links. Neither company plans to be in operation for several years, but Musk's SpaceX is ready to test two satellites.

The application calls for launching two identical Ku-band downlink satellites (cubesats?), which will orbit at 625 kilometers and have an expected lifetime of 6-12 months. The objective of the launch is:

To validate the design of a broadband antenna communications platform (primary payload) that will lead to the final LEO constellation design using three broadband array test ground stations positioned along the western coast of the US.

They will do broadband array testing using a network of three broadband test ground locations at SpaceX Headquarters in Hawthorne, California, Tesla Motors Headquarters in Fremont, California and SpaceX Washington in Redmond, Washington. (It pays to own multiple companies). Two types of ground terminal will be evaluated at each location.

These test results will lead to a revised, perhaps final version of the satellites and ground stations. I've no idea how soon they might be ready for operation, but SpaceX is first out of the gate in the satellite constellation Internet service race.

OneWeb seems to be working with many partners -- OneWeb CEO Greg Wyler is shown below with Stéphane Israël, Chairman and CEO of Arianespace (center) and Richard Branson, founder of Virgin Galactic (right) -- while SpaceX is working on their own satellites and launch vehicles.

Saturday, May 16, 2015

Let's not bury the lead -- I admire Elon Musk. He is an inventor/entrepreneur reminiscent of people like Samuel Morse and Thomas Edison. Let me tell you why I admire him, then suggest that you watch videos of an interview of and two talks by Musk.

Musk was thoughtful at an early age. While he was in college, he concluded that the three areas that would most affect the future of humanity were the Internet, sustainable energy and space exploration. He did not expect to found companies in all three areas, but went to grad school to work on energy storage for electric cars (using capacitors, not batteries). He realized that his capacitor storage might fail and decided he would rather work on the Internet than study it.

He speaks of large problems he wants to solve, not of business, profit, return on investment or stock prices -- those are means to his ends. He wants to bring Internet connectivity to sparsely populated and developing areas and provide 50% of global, long-distance connectivity (5-15 years), accelerate the advent of sustainable transport (half of our cars to be electric in 13-14 years), send people to Mars (12 years) and eliminate use of fossil fuels (a generation or two).

He is not trying to do any of this on his own -- he wants to be a catalyst. Tesla was created to accelerate the advent of sustainable transport, not to dominate the car industry, so they will not initiate patent lawsuits against anyone who, in good faith, wants to use their technology. Similarly, Musk sees their huge battery factory, Gigafactory version 1, as a product to be replicated by others -- The Tesla policy of open sourcing patents will continue for the Gigafactory and battery systems.

He is a relaxed speaker with a sense of humor. Musk and Steve Jobs are two of the best speakers I have seen, but a Jobs presentation was planned and rehearsed to perfection, while Musk seems to be speaking off the cuff. That being said, his product introductions in the following Tesla Energy talk were reminiscent of Jobs -- he used a few slides with images, not text, and spoke over them in the Jobs style. He even included a Jobs-like surprise. He revealed that the auditorium and talk were powered by his batteries, which had been charged using solar power (image below) -- like Job's "one more thing" moments or the "three new products" that turned out to be the iPhone.

If you would like to get to know Elon Musk and how I came to admire him, I recommend the following videos. (I have my students watch them).

Sal Khan of the Khan Academy interviewing Elon Musk
April 2013, 48:41, 502,483 views
This conversation gives insight into Musk’s goals and his motivation for investing in Tesla and SpaceX and you get know Sal Khan as well.

Announcement of Tesla Energy
May 2015, 18:02, 2,112,997 views
In this presentation, Musk announces products -- integrated, open-source battery systems for consumers, enterprises and utilities and the open source Gigafactory to manufacture them.

If you'd like to see more, there is a YouTube channel that claims to have links to every Elon Musk video and you can read an excerpt from a forthcoming biography of Musk here. It's a long post that traces events from his early desire to grow plants on Mars in order to stimulate interest in space through the near-bankruptcy of Tesla and/or SpaceX, which was averted at the last minute by winning a NASA contract. You can see a video (4:53) of an interview of the author, Bloomberg's Ashlee Vance, here.

-----
Update 6/29/2015

This post looks at "the bad behavior of visionary leaders" and concludes that leaders like Musk, Jobs and Bezos could be more effective it they behaved better:

The question raised by the stories of these three men is not whether being tough, harsh and relentlessly demanding gets people to work better. Of course it doesn’t, and certainly not sustainably. Can anyone truly doubt that people are productive in workplaces that help them to be healthier and happier?

The more apt question is how much more these men could have enhanced thousands of people’s lives – and perhaps made them even more successful — if they had invested as much in taking care of them as they did in conceiving great products.

I've personally been chewed out by the young Bill Gates and wonder whether he should not be added to this list.

Lynda.com has focused on vocational training and lifelong learning since its begining in 1995. They have developed over 2,900 video courses in English, German, French, Spanish, and Japanese and have 4 million subscribers in 150 countries.

LindedIn has 350 million users who are looking for career advancement and job opportunities. (It's currently the 14th most visited Web site on the Internet).

LinkedIn has acquired Lynda.com and one can imagine the combined company pointing users to specific courses that would help them move up in their current positions or find better jobs.

That seems to be the basic idea and they say they want to do it on an ambitious global scale. Ryan Roslansky, Head of Content at LinkedIn, says the vision of the merged company is to "create economic opportunity for every member of the global workforce" and their goal is to "lift and transform the global ecomomy."

(That sounds like something you might hear in a VC pitch in the comedy TV series "Silicon Valley," but let's suspend judgement).

They hope to create an "economic graph" -- compling databases with profiles of every member of the global workforce (what they have studied and what their skills are) and the available jobs and skills required to obtain those jobs at every every company in the world. Those databases plus an inventory of courses offered by every higher education organization and university will let people find the training they need to get a specific job and let employers find the people who are qualified to do a particular job.

My first reaction is that establishing standards and definitions that would enable them to come close to that vision across a variety of industries, cultures and languages is impossible, but they might be able to create economic graphs for specific industries and countries.

I worked as a consultant to Hyundai some time ago, and the Human Resources department had a system for tracking employee skills, job skill requirements and available training classes. There are also human resources software packages like Trackstar for such systems. Perhaps LinkedIn will take a bottom-up approach, replicating this sort of system industry by industry.

A couple of years ago, I wrote a post asking if there was a place for Lynda.com and other online training companies in the MOOC discussion. It's become clear that the answer is "yes" and with this acquisition, LinkedIn will be a prominent player and competitor to companies like Udacity and Coursera. To the extent that company hiring practices and societal certification change, they will also be an alternative to universities for students whose promary goal is getting a good job.

Here is a video of LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner describing the Economic Graph and their vision for the next ten years:

Saturday, April 11, 2015

Microsoft was founded in April 1975, when the personal computing hobby was just beginning, and the Economist has an article on the company evolution to "middle age."

Microsoft began with development tools -- a BASIC interpreter and Pascal and Fortran compilers -- but soon moved on to Windows and later Office. Under Bill Gates, and later Steve Balmer, the company strategy was to "strengthen Windows, to make it ever more crushingly dominant." That strategy worked well during the desktop/laptop/on-premises server era, but it constrained Microsoft -- keeping them from purusing new opportunities on the Internet and mobile devices.

Current CEO Satya Nadella, shown below with Gates and Balmer, has a different strategy -- "just build stuff that people like."

That has led to the porting of Office to other operating systems and the Internet, support of open source and emphasis on their Internet platform, Azure.

The article constrasts Microsoft's middle age slump with Apple (founded in April 1976), which has passed them in profit:

and now accounts for a much larger percent of the US technology sector than Microsoft:

The Economist article is on Microsoft, but the fall from dominance of IBM, as illustrated in the above graph, is even more striking. IBM totally dominated the (smaller) technology market until a disruptive startup, Microsoft, led the revolution that toppled them.

Friday, April 10, 2015

The complexity for minimum component costs has increased at a rate of roughly a factor of two per year. Certainly over the short term this rate can be expected to continue, if not to increase. Over the longer term, the rate of increase is a bit more uncertain, although there is no reason to believe it will not remain nearly constant for at least 10 years. That means by 1975, the number of components per integrated circuit for minimum cost will be 65,000.

Note that he is not talking about what would be the largest theoretically possible chips, but about what would be cost effective.

Moore's prediction was based upon extrapolation of the history of the integrated circuits up to that time:

Note that he is predicting exponential growth -- growth at a constant percentage rate.

He does not use the term "Moore's Law" in the article, but the term/meme caught on and we are still using it to describe exponential growth of all things techie -- storage and memory density and speed, communication speed, etc.

Moore's projection held up well beyond 10 years. In this plot of the number of transistors on commercial CPU chips through 2011, the line represents doubling every two years:

The accuracy of his projection is all the more remarkable when you realize that the prediction was made six years before Intel's first CPU chip, the 4004, which had 2,300 transistors.

At some point, density increases will level off, but that point has not yet been reached. Apple's 8X system on a chip that is inside your iPad Air has 3 billion transistors.

The first electromechanical compputers used electromagnetic relays as switching elements. Folloiwing genertions moved to vacuumn tubes, transistors and today's integrated circuits. When Moore's law finaly hits the wall, will we move to another switching technology and continue improvement?

A Re/code article says Moore's law is 50, but may not reach 60. The article quotes Intel executive Tracy Smith as saying they expect to be making chips with 5 nanometer features (about twice the size of a strand of DNA) around 2022, but that will be the end of the line.

The article goes on to speculate on what technology might come next -- the red question mark in the above figure -- but makes no predicitions. It also includes the following video (1m 53s) of Gordon Moore reflecting back on his 1965 article and the term "Moore's law," coined by semiconductor pioneer Carver Mead.

Wyler plans a constellation of about 650 satellites in low-earth orbit (about 1,200 kilometers). He said that they plan to launch satellites in 2017 and hope to begin offering service in 2019. (It seems that OneWeb is ahead of the SpaceX schedule).

They will offer 50 mbps, 30 ms latency connectivity to $250 ground stations that will also serve as hot-spots, providing WiFi, LTE, 3G or 2G connectivity.

As shown below, a terrestrial route between Los Angeles and the tip of Chile requires 14 hops. The same route via satellite may require only five low-latency hops. (The figure is drawn to scale).

Think about the possibility of a WiFi network with a low-latency, 50 mbps back-haul link to the Internet in every school or rural clinic in the world.

Wyler showed a prototype of one of his ground-stations and also showed how easy it is to set up. The operator just spreads the solar panels and turns it on -- five seconds install time. Here we see one on the corrugated roof of a building:

This ease of deployment would be terrific for establishing ad hoc communication in the wake of disasters that had disrupted terrestrial communication.

While I have focused on OneWeb's primary goal of providing Internet connectivity in developing nations and rural areas, Wyler also spoke of providing connectivity in aircraft (and ships at sea).

Of course, all of this is speculation for now. Some conference attendees and presenters were skeptical about Wyler's project, pointing out that his low-cost satellites would have to be replaced every five years or so -- a recurring expense. Critics also pointed out that much of the time, the low-earth orbit satellites will be over oceans, polar regions and other sparsely populated areas.

That being said, Wyler has been able to attract backers and partners, each of which brings money and expertise to the table:

Like a modern Internet company that follows the dictum "do what you do best and link to the rest," OneWeb will focus on the backbone and market through local retail Internet service and cell phone providers.

One can also imagine OneWeb providing competition for conventional terrestrial ISPs in developed nations. I can dream of going over to Best Buy, picking up a OneWeb ground station, installing it on my roof and escaping the clutches of my ISP monopolist Time Warner Cable. I am not holding my breath till that happens, but I will be keeping my eye on OneWeb's ambitious project.

For some background on Wyler's previous satellite company, O3B Networks, and more on his plans for OneWeb, check out this video:

Wyler says "We've got a pretty clear path. It's not just a technology problem. It is a technology, regulatory, implementation, education problem. It's kind of a little bit of everything." In the interview, he talks about terminal design, their business model and spectrum.

As mentioned above, he stresses ease of installation and low cost for the terminals. OneWeb has the rights to the Ku and Ka spectrum they will use and patent-pending technology to assure non-interference with geo-stationary satellites in those bands. Scale is critical to their business model -- once the constellation is operating, they marginal cost of a new customer is very low.

and they brought their virtual reality, remote control excavator with them to MWC:

The final products will probably not be as fast as these prototypes, but they will eventually cost about the same as today's mobile radios.

Both Samsung and Ericsson are talking about initial deployment around 2020, but general rollout and ubiquitous adoption will take many years after that. (This is one technology in which developing nations, which are generally more mobile reliant than developed nations, may somewhat narrow the digital divide). Furthermore, there are no 5G standards, and you can bet there will be more than one.

&ltdream&gt
Wouldn't it be nice if there were a global 5G standard -- everyone using the same license free spectrum and protocols -- your phone moving seamlessly between nations and carriers -- cars that were compatible with instrumented roads everywhere ... like WiFi ...?
&lt/dream&gt

Awake again -- Maybe I will get a Verizon 5G phone for use in the US around 2022.

By that time, out mobile devices will be 10-20 times as powerful and there will be a lot of "things" connected to the Internet. What new applications will we find for this high-speed, low-latency wireless connectivity?

I've not heard about this effort until now, but former Schlumberger executives Cliff Anders and Phil Marlar have been developing the network architecture, spectrum plan and satellite payload since 2013, and they just hired satellite industry veteran Vern Fotheringham as CEO.

Leosat will not be marketing to individual end users, but will target government and business -- maritime applications, oil and gas exploration and productions, telecom back-haul and trunking, enterprise VSAT, etc. Their market seems closer to Wyler's former company O3b, but Leosat plans to cover the entire Earth, while O3b is restricted to locations near the equator.

They plan to offer encrypted connectivity at up to 1.2 gbps with latency under 50 ms using a constellation of 80 to 120 small satellites, with launches beginning in 2019 or 2020.

While SpaceX and OneWeb have focused their publicity on end users and developing nations, they will also have the ability to deliver low latency service over long distances. As shown below, a terrestrial link from my home in Los Angeles to La Universidad de Magallanes in Punta Arenas, Chile required 14 hops whereas a satellite route could be achieved with five hops. (The following illustration is drawn to approximate scale assuming a satellite altitude of 700 miles).

The Ping time for the terrestrial link averages around 224 ms, considerably slower than the sub 50 ms latency Leosat hopes to achieve.

Like many Americans, I am served by a monopoly Internet service provider. Might these folks actually be able to provide competition -- at least in the developing world -- some day?

Monday, March 09, 2015

I've been studying and working on the Internet in developing nations since 1991 when only a few nations had any sort of Internet connection, as shown in Larry Landweber's 1991 connectivity map:

Every nation is connected today, but the digital divide remains as deep as it was in 1991. Both Facebook and Google are working to bring the 3-4 billion people who do not have Internet connectivity online and they described their efforts at the recent Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.

Google

Sundar Pichai, senior vice president of Android, Chrome and Apps at Google Inc., updated the audience on two projects -- Project Loon and Project Link.

Project Loon seeks to deploy a constellation of balloons at an altitude of around 20 kilometers -- above the mountains, air traffic and weather.

The balloons will be airborne routers able to communicate with end users, each other and Internet back-haul locations.

Pinchai said the balloons now average more than six months in the air and keep nearby smartphones operating at 4G or LTE speeds, around 10 megabits per second. “We are well on our way to a platform that, by the end of the decade, will touch 4 to 5 billion people.”

He also gave a progress report on Project Link in Kampala, Uganda where they have installed over 800km of fiber, creating an urban backbone.

As is often the case with municipal networks (as in Stockholm), Google is not a retail Internet service provider, but provides wholesale connectivity to retailers. Pichai said they would be expanding Project Link -- installing fiber backbones "many more" African cities this year.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg spoke about Internet.org, which hopes to make basic internet services affordable, so everyone with a phone can join the knowledge economy.

While Google is working on long range projects (including an investment in Elon Musk's SpaceX project to provide Internet service using low-earth orbit satellites), Internet.org is already up and running in Ghana, Columia, Kenya, Tanzania, Indonesia and India.

Facebook also has a Connectivity Lab lab working on more exotic, long-range solutions.

Short videos on Project Loon and Internet.org

Project Loon:

Internet.org:

-----
Update 4/10/2015

Mark Zuckerberg spoke at a business conference being held in conjunction with the Summit of the Americas in Panama City yesterday. He announced that Internet.org would be available in Panama and stated that eventually expanding into Cuba “definitely fits within our mission.” (Recall that Internet.org provides “basic Internet services" -- access to leading Web sites -- not access to the open Internet).

The Indian government banned the showing of the film and the BBC blocked it on YouTube for copyright reasons. (Perhaps it is visible in Britain).

Banning the video gave it notoriety, increasing its popularity. (This is an example of the so called "Streisand effect," referring to the rush to view an aerial view of Barbara Streisand's house when she objected to it being posted online).

I am not certain when it was banned on YouTube, but it became available on Vimeo on March 5 and by the afternoon of the 6th had been viewed 60,000 times, but it was subsequently taken down.

As of this writing, it is available on the Daily Motion site. By the time you read this, it may be gone from there, but you will probably be able to find it using Google search. (If you are reading this from England or using a VPN -- is it still available on the BBC Web site)?

At nearly the same time, the Chinese government blocked access to "Under the Dome," a scathing documentary on pollution, which had hundreds of millions of view on Chinese Web sites within days of its release.

It may have been banned in China, but it is readily accessible in other nations (with English subtitles) and to any Chinese person willing to use a VPN to view it on YouTube.

A Coursera Specialization requires completion of a group of related courses followed by a capstone project. A Specializations consists of several online courses, developed at universities, leading up to a real capstone project/case study developed by a company in the relevant industry.

For example, the University of California at San Diego (UCSD) and Instagram have collaborated on an interaction design Specialization. UCSD will provide six MOOC-format courses and the capstone project will come from Instagram.

Students can still take the courses for free, but they will not receive a certification of completion and will not be allowed to do the capstone project. Students wishing to complete the capstone and receive a certificate of completion will pay a tuition of $343.

The SMC program would take longer to complete and would cost more in terms of tuition and opportunity cost, but it covers more ground and is taught face-to-face.

These are interesting, innovative times for vocational education. Hiring practices and societal values will eventually determine the winners, but for now, how would you advise a young person who wanted to become an interaction designer?

Saturday, February 07, 2015

Sunday February 8 at 6:10 EST (two minutes after sunset), a SpaceX rocket is scheduled to launch. Previous SpaceX satellites delivered payloads into low-Earth orbit, but this one is destined for the Lagrangian Point nearly 1 million miles from Earth.

At the Lagrangian point 1 (or L1), approximately one
million miles from Earth, the gravitational forces between
the sun and Earth are balanced, which provides a stable
orbit that requires fewer orbital corrections for the
spacecraft to remain in itsoperational location for a
longer period of time.
Source: NOAA

SpaceX will attempt, for the second time, to recover the rocket. The first time they tried to recover a rocket they failed, but they understand the reason for the failure and hopefully will succeed this time.

The satellite, called "DSCOVR," has scientific and symbolic goals. At the Lagrangian Point, DSCOVR will remain stationary with respect to the Earth and the Sun, enabling it observe the Sun and serve as an early warning system for potentially disruptive solar flares.

Being stationary relative to the Earth will also enable DSCOVR to serve as a distant "Web cam" providing us with a feed of the entire, fully-lit Earth -- an ever changing version of the famous "Blue Marble" picture taken from Appolo 17. (Al Gore called for this space cam while Vice President and, after a long political struggle, his vision is about to be realized).

With a bit more than two minutes to go, the Falcon 9 launch was scrubbed -- there was an apparent problem with part of the telemetry system as well as at an Air Force radar tracking station.

They may try again tomorrow about two minutes earlier than today.

The picture below is from the launch live stream just after it was scrubbed.

-----
Update 2/9/2015

Weather conditions are not favorable for a Monday launch and so NASA, NOAA, the U.S. Air Force and SpaceX have made the decision to postpone the launch until Tuesday, February 10 at 6:05pm ET with a backup date of Wednesday, February 11.

-----
Update 4/14/2015

Elon Musk tweets the bad news -- SpaceX failed again to recapture a rocket after launch.

-----
Update 4/15/2015

A Boeing-Lockheed joint venture is also working on a reusable rocket engine to compete with SpaceX and to reduce dependence on Russian rockets. That will increase the competitve pressure on SpaceX, leading them to cut costs of a potential satellite Internet offering.

-----
Update 4/21/2015

SpaceX reports that their latest failure to retrieve a rocket failed because of a "slower than expected throttle valve response." The next attempt will be in two months. They are learning from their mistakes and rocket reuse will eventually be routine.

Thursday, January 29, 2015

Would global Internet service providers require unique regulation and, if so, what should it be and who has the power to do it?

SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, who hopes to orbit a constellation of Internet-access satellites, recently gave an invitation-only talk announcing the opening of a satellite-design office in Seattle. (An attendee recorded the talk and posted it on YouTube).

Many invitees were engineers and Musk was recruiting, saying "it's a difficult problem so we need the smartest engineers in the world." Then, after a pause, he joked "and at the same time to make sure we don't create SkyNet."

The audience laughed, but he was, perhaps inadvertently, alluding to a serious issue. Issac Asimov wrote of Gaia, a sentient planet, and, while the Internet may be the embryonic nervous system of our planet, I am less worried about Musk creating SkyNet than creating Comcast on Steroids.

Two companies, Musk's SpaceX and Greg Wyler's OneWeb, are competing to provide Internet connectivity in locations that are now unconnected -- as Wyler puts it, to connect "the other three billion." If one or both succeed, we might have have a monopoly or oligopoly ISP serving half the Earth's population.

As a Time-Warner Cable Internet customer, that worries me. They would be able to charge monopoly-level prices and offer the same last-place customer satisfaction as American ISPs. They would be global companies with political power and the ability to control half the world's information -- a combination of the Koch brothers, Fox News and Comcast.

Do these potentially global service providers require unique regulation and, if so, what should it be and who has the power to do it?

What might the regulation be? I can ask the question, but neither I nor anyone else knows The Answer; however, one suggestion is to keep both SpaceX and OneWeb out of the retail Internet service market -- restrict them to providing wholesale transport service on an equal basis to any would-be retail ISP. Even if only one of the two companies succeed, that would allow for retail competition and would help out with the monopoly price and crummy service issues.

A possible approach to avoiding political abuse would be to prohibit them from refusing service to any retail ISP in any nation.

Regardless of what we wish to do, who has the authority to create and enforce such regulations? Musk said SpaceX has the ITU's permission to launch the satellites and recognized that he will have to negotiate for the right to provide service on a country by country basis. SpaceX and OneWeb are both US corporations and therefore subject to US law, but is it right for global infrastructure to be regulated by a single nation?

Lest this sound too negative, I hope SpaceX and OneWeb both succeed in connecting the other three billion people on the planet -- the benefit to mankind will outweigh the difficulty of defining acceptable, effective policy.

Cuba has been in the news since President Obama announced changes in our Cuba policy and agreed to the prisoner exchange that freed Alan Gross, who was serving a 15 year sentence for bringing tech equipment into Cuba.

I've not posted anything on this blog for several weeks because I have been busy with recent events on another blog I maintain on the Internet in Cuba. The following are my recent posts concerning Alan Gross and the future of the Internet in Cuba. They are in chronological order, beginning with a November 11 post asking whether Gross was about to be freed:

On December 27, I went to the Microsoft store in the Century City mall in Los Angeles to take a look at low cost laptops I had heard reviewed favorably on a podcast, thinking I might get one to take on an upcoming trip.

The sales people were friendly and left me alone while I played with a variety of computers for around half an hour. This is what the store looked like:

It turned out the cheap laptops were too cheesy so I left and walked around the corner to the Apple store:

The store was noisy and jammed and there was a roped-off line of people waiting to be allowed in when others left.

The Microsoft store had ultrabooks with great keyboards, trackpads and touch screens and a variety of all-in-one computers. The product quality ranged from those cheesy laptops to very nice machines that were better deals than comparable Apple computers. You could walk right up and talk to a tech support or sales person in the Microsoft store, but needed an appointment to talk with one of the tech support "geniuses" in the Apple store.

Monday, November 24, 2014

What comes to mind when you hear the word Rand? Ayn Rand? Rand Paul? For me, it is the RAND Corporation. Project RAND (research and development) was housed at Douglas Aircraft in Santa Monica, California immediately after World War II, and became an independent, nonprofit organization in 1948. Perhaps the first "think tank," they spun off their development work, creating the the System Development Corporation (SDC) in 1957.

I don't know how one ranks research institutions, but, for me, RAND ranks right up there with Bell Labs, IBM Research and newcomers Microsoft and Google research. The following are summaries of a some of the computer science advances made by RAND researchers and consultants.

Communication satellites: Science fiction writer Arthur C. Clark outlined the vision of geostationary communication satellites in a short article published in October, 1945. Five months later, Frank Collbohm and James Lipp published a comprehensive engineering study on a "Preliminary Design of an Experimental World-Circling Spaceship."

Arthur C. Clarke's vision (left) and RAND's design

Artificial intelligence: Herbert Simon, Allen Newell and Cliff Shaw did early work on artificial intelligence at RAND and Carnegie Tech. They asked people to talk out loud while proving theorems and noted that their strategy was to apply operations that reduced the differences between the current state of the proof and the theorem they were trying to prove. Their programs, Logic Theorist and General Problem Solver, did the same -- and so does this pigeon:

Operations research: George Dantzig and Richard Bellman invented mathematical techniques for finding optimal or near-optimal solutions to complex, but well defined problems. This work has applications in network design and you use Dantzig's simplex algorithm whenever you build an Excel spreadsheet to solve a linear programming problem.

SIMSCRIPT: Harry Markowitz and Bernard Hausner invented the SIMSCRIPT programming language for simulating systems like customers moving through checkout stands at a market. SIMSCRIPT was an early object-oriented language in that it modeled the world as sets of entities and their attributes. Entities could be created and destroyed and their attribute values and set memberships changed when events in simulated time occurred. (SIMSCRIPT is close to my heart because it was the subject of the first class I ever taught. Unfortunately, my wife threw out my SIMSCRIPT t-shirt years ago).

T-shirt -- Entities, Attributes and Sets

An early research computer: Early computers were built as research projects at universities. You can recognize them by their names ending in "AC" for automatic calculator. RAND's JOHNNIAC (named in honor of mathematician and computer architect John von Neumann) was a stored program computer. It was used for applications including the early artificial intelligence research and operations research mentioned above.

JOHNNIAC

Timesharing: Terminals and drum storage were added to the JOHNNIAC, enabling Cliff Shaw to create JOSS (JOHNNIAC Open Shop System), one of the first interactive time sharing systems. JOSS was "open shop" in that users interacted directly with the computer rather than dropping off jobs to be run at a later time by a computer operator. I was fortunate to see demonstrations of both JOSS and QUICKTRAN, an interactive FORTRAN interpreter built by John Morrisey of IBM. The advantage of these systems over batch processing was immediately and strikingly apparent. This led me to SDC (mentioned above), which by then had a more advanced time sharing system that I used for my dissertation research on man-machine data analysis.

Programmer at a JOSS terminal

The RAND tablet: The RAND Tablet, the great grandfather of the iPad, was built by Tom Ellis and his colleagues. Their GRAIL (graphical input language) software featured object-oriented drawing and character recognition. Their publications are some of the earliest work on human-computer interaction -- GRAIL was the great grandfather of Macdraw. (The following video clip is narrated by Alan Kay of Dynabook fame).

Traffic to be transmitted is first chopped into small blocks, called Message Blocks or simply messages. These messages are then relayed from station to station through the network with each station acting as a small "post office" connected to adjacent "post offices."

After simulating this system and considering the technology of the day, Baran concluded in Volume 11 that

It appears theoretically possible to build large networks able to withstand heavy damage whether caused by unreliability of components or by enemy attack.

He was right!

Paul Baran's distributed network arhitecture

In the following video, Baran reviews RAND's work on distributed networks and packet switching -- from early concern over the possibility of a nuclear attack disrupting military communications through skepticism about packet switching and the creation of the ARPANet. (Since the ARPANet was just a research project, they did not need to bother with security and encryption).

Two of the people cited here went on to win Nobel prizes. Harry Markowitz received the Nobel Prize in economics for his work on portfolio theory -- perhaps not tied to his work on digital simulation.

Herbert Simon also received the Nobel Prize in economics for his work on decision making. He noted that we do not make optimal decisions when choosing among alternatives because information about outcomes is incomplete, gathering more information has a cost and outcomes are multidimensional. In real life we make satisfatory decisions. This realization no doubt guided his studies of the thought processes of chess players and theorem provers and therefore his work on artificial intelligence.

(A personal note: I took a class from professor Simon as an undergrad. All I recall was that I liked him a lot and he told us about the chess game his "computer" -- whatever that was -- was playing with a computer in Arizona. I also met him much later, and he was modest and helpful -- told me he stored most of what he knew in his friend's heads).

You can learn more about any of this work on Wikipedia or using Google, but -- better yet -- download the historic reports by these researchers from the RAND Web site.

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Update 11/29/2014

As noted above, RAND spun off its development work in 1957 when SDC was set up to build the SAGE (Semi-Automatic Ground Environment) air defence system, designed to defend the U.S. against nuclear attack.

SAGE was the first computer network and the project trained most of the computer programmers in the US at the time. The project also produced many innovations in programming and programming project management.

After SAGE, SDC built an advanced general purpose time-sharing and software development system on an AN/FSQ-32 (Army Navy Fixed Special eQuipment) computer built by IBM. The Q-32 was used for ARPA-sponsored research projects in man-machine interaction -- including my dissertation project. More on SDC in a forthcoming post.

Monday, November 17, 2014

18F: Open source and transparent processes -- who says government has to be old fashioned, slow and inefficient?

In an earlier post, I described USDS and 18F, new government agencies that are intended to improve US e-government in the wake of the HealthCare.Gov debacle. USDS is a management consulting firm for federal agencies that favors lean startup methods, open source and agile development by small teams. 18F complements USDS -- they build tools and implement government systems.

You can check 18F's open source projects at the "alpha" version of their project dashboard. As shown here, they currently have twelve projects in various stages of development.

Scrolling down, one sees the entries for each of the 12 current projects. For example, they are building a portal for submitting and searching for Freedom of Information Act requests for the Justice Department. (Note that the department is a partner not a client).

18F is not unique. The UK Government Digital Service has the goal of "transforming government services to make them more efficient and effective for users." They were formed several years ago in response to dissatisfaction with the British Health System Web site. You can learn more in this NPR story.

18F and the UK Government Digital Service have something very important in common -- they are staffed by skilled experts who could be making more money in the private sector but have elected (perhaps temporary) government service. I saw the same thing in a study of the Internet in Singapore where the "best and the brightest," went to government service.

How great would it be if all of government were staffed by the same sort of people?

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Update 4/26/2015

The Defence Department and Homeland Security hope to attract tech talent from Silicon Valley and elsewhere to help with security and other applications. This initiative "stems directly from the President," who has turned to modern technology and methods in political campaigns, debugging the Healthcare.gov site when it was in trouble and more. The pitch is to "take your skills and work for team America."